Message from Beyond the Grave: Claire's Story

Claire and Annette, both single women in their early twenties, worked next to one another as employees of a commercial firm in Germany.

Although they were never very close friends, they shared a courteous mutual regard, which led to an exchange of ideas, and eventually of confidences.

Claire professed herself openly religious and felt it her duty to instruct and admonish Annette when the latter appeared excessively casual or superficial in religious matters.

In due course Annette got married and left the firm. A year later, in the autumn of 1937, Claire was on holiday at Lake Garda in northern Italy. Towards the middle of September, she received a letter from her mother: "Annette is dead. She was the victim of a motor car accident and was buried yesterday at Wald-Friedhof" or Forest Cemetery.

Claire was frightened since she knew her friend had not been very religious. Had she been prepared to appear before God? Dying suddenly, what was the state of her soul at the moment of death? What had happened to her?

The following morning Claire attended Holy Mass, received Holy Communion, and prayed fervently for her friend.

That same night Claire dreamed that she heard the thud of something dropped outside the front door, that she had got up and found an envelope addressed to her in the unmistakeable handwriting of Annette.

Upon waking Claire was able to remember and write down word-for-word the entire content of the letter.

The experience was so moving and life-changing that, after seeing to publication of the letter as of benefit to others, Claire became a nun.

Here then, as related by Claire, is Annette's message from beyond the grave.

Clara, do not pray for me! I am in hell. If I tell you this and speak at length about it, do not think it is because of our friendship. We here do not love anyone anymore.

I do this as under constraint. In truth I would like to see you too cast into this place where I must remain forever.

Perhaps that angers you. But here we all think that way. Our will is hardened in evil, what you call evil. Even when we do something good, as I do now in opening your eyes about hell, it is never because of a good intention.

Do you remember when we first met four years ago? You were then 23 and had already been with the firm for six months. Because I was a beginner, you gave me some helpful advice and put me in touch with some good people, whatever good means. Back then I praised your love of neighbor. How ridiculous! Your help was mere coquetry. We here don't acknowledge any good in anybody.

Do you remember what I told you about my youth? Now I am painfully compelled to fill in some of the gaps.

According to the plan of my parents, I should never have even existed. A misfortune brought about my conception. My two sisters were already 14 and 15 when I was born.

Would that I had never existed! Would that I could now annihilate myself! Escape these tortures! No pleasure would equal that with which I would abandon my existence, as a garment of ashes blown away by the wind lost in nothingness. But I must continue to exist. As I chose to make myself, as a ruined person.

When father and mother, still young, left the country for the city, they lost touch with the Church and were keeping company with other irreligious people.

They had met at a dance and after six months of companionship, they had to get married. As a result of the nuptial ceremony, so much holy water stuck to them that my mother attended Sunday Mass a couple of times a year.

But, she never taught me to pray. Instead, she was completely taken up with the daily cares of life, even though our situation was not that bad.

Those words--prayer, Mass, religious instruction, holy water, Church--fill me with such strong repugnance that I find it unspeakably revolting to utter them. I hate all that, as I hate all those who go to church, and in general every human being, and every thing.

From a great many things do we receive torment. Every knowledge received at the hour of death, every remembrance of things lived or known, is for us a piercing flame. In each remembrance, good and bad, we see the way in which grace was present, the graces we spurned, ignored, neglected.

What a torture is this! We do not eat, we do not sleep, we do not stand, we do not walk. Chained up, with weeping and gnashing of teeth, we look with horror at the ruins of our life.

All that is left is hating and suffering. Do you hear? We here drink hatred like water, even among ourselves. Above all we hate God.

With reluctance do I force myself to make you understand. The elect in heaven cannot help loving God because they see Him without veil in all His dazzling beauty. That gives them indescribable bliss. We know this and the knowledge makes us furious.

Men on earth, who know God from creation and from revelation, can love Him, but they are not compelled to do so.

The believer--I say this with gnashing of teeth--who contemplates Christ with his arms outstretched on the cross will end up by loving Him.

But he whom God approaches only in the final storm, as punisher, as just avenger, such a person, whom God has rejected, cannot but hate Him eternally with all the audacity of his wicked will.

Yes, hate Him, with all the strength of a freely willed decision against Him. We died with willful resolve to be separated from God. Even now we would not wish to change it, nor shall we ever wish to.

Do you understand now why hell lasts forever? It is because our wills were fixed for all eternity at the moment of death. Our obstinacy will never leave us.

Under compulsion, I must add that God is merciful even towards us. I affirm many things against my will and must choke the torrent of lies and abuse I should like to vomit out.

God was merciful by not allowing our wicked wills to exhaust themselves on earth, as we would have been prepared to do. This would have added to our faults and therefore our pains. He caused us to die before our time, as in my case, or He brought in some other kind of mitigating circumstance.

Even now He shows Himself merciful towards us by not forcing us any closer to Him than we are here in this remote inferno. That lessens our torment. Every step bringing us closer to God would cause us a greater pain than a step closer to a burning furnace would cause you.

You were shocked once when we were out walking and I told you that a few days before my First Communion, my father had said to me: "My little Annette, the main thing is your beautiful white dress, all the rest is just make-believe." Because of your concern, I was almost ashamed. Now I sneer at it.

The only sensible thing is we were not allowed to receive Communion until the age of 12. By then I was already absorbed in worldly amusements and found it easy to set aside without scruple the things of religion. Thus I attached no great importance to my First Communion.

We are furious that many children go to Communion at the age of seven. We do all we can to make people believe that children have insufficient knowledge at that age.

First they must have time to commit a few mortal sins. Then the little white disc will not do so much damage to our cause as it would when faith, hope, and charity (aagh, these things!) received in Baptism are still alive in their hearts. If you remember I was already thinking along these lines when I was on earth.

I have already mentioned my father. He often used to fight with my mother. I did not say much to you about it because I was ashamed. How ridiculous, to be ashamed of something evil. It is all the same to us here.

My parents no longer slept in the same room. I was in with my mother, and my father had the room next door, so that he could come in as late as he liked. He used to drink heavily, and was squandering all of our money on alcohol. My sisters both went out to work because they said they needed the money, and my mother took a job to bring something in as well. During the last year of his life my father often used to beat my mother when she would not let him have any money.

On the other hand, he was always kind to me. One day--I told you about this and you were shocked at my capriciousness (come to that, was there anything about me that did not shock you?)--anyhow one day my father bought me a pair of shoes, and I made him take them back at least twice because the style and the heels were not up-to-date enough for me.

The night my father had the stroke something happened to me that I did not dare tell you about for fear you would take it the wrong way. But now you have to know about it. It is important because it was then that I was first attacked by the spirit that now torments me.

I was asleep in the bedroom with my mother. I could tell from her deep breathing that she was sound asleep. Suddenly I heard someone calling my name. A voice I did not know was saying, "What will happen if your father dies?"

Since he had been treating my mother so badly, I had stopped loving my father--in fact, from that time, I did not love anyone anymore. I was just fond of a few people who cared about me. Outright love, a love that does not expect any reward--that only exists in souls that are in the state of grace, and mine certainly wasn't.

I did not know who was asking me this strange question, so I just said, "But he isn't going to die." There was silence for a while, then I heard the same question again. Again I snapped back, "He is not going to die!" Again silence. Then a third time the voice asked me, "What will happen if your father dies?"

I began to think of how my father had come home drunk, shouting at my mother and beating her. I remembered how he had humiliated us in front of our friends and neighbours. I got angry and blurted out, "Well, it will serve him right!" After that there was silence.

In the morning when my mother wanted to go in and tidy up my father's room she found the door locked. Around midday they forced the door open and found my father's body lying half-dressed on the bed. He had been in bad health for a long time. He must have had some sort of accident while he was going to fetch another beer from the cellar.

Martha and you induced me to enter The Association of Young Ladies. I never hid the fact that I considered the talks given by the organisers pretty parochial sort of stuff, but the games were amusing. As you know I immediately took a leading role. I also liked the picnics.

I even let myself be induced to go to Confession and Communion occasionally, although I did not have anything to confess. I did not consider thoughts and words were of any importance, and at the time I was not sufficiently corrupted to go in for any really immoral actions.

Once you warned me, "Anne, if you do not pray more, you go to perdition." Well, you were right when you said that I did not pray much, and when I did, it was in a casual sort of way. I used to pray very little indeed, and even that unwillingly.

You were only too right. All of those who are now burning in hell were people who did not pray or did not pray enough.

Prayer is the first step towards God. And it is always the decisive step. Especially prayer to her who is the Mother of Christ, and whose name we never pronounce. Devotion to her rescues from the devil's clutches countless souls who would otherwise infallibly fall into his hands as a result of sin.

To tell you all this is burning me up with rage and I am only going on because I am forced to.

To pray is the easiest thing a man can do on earth. And it is precisely to this easy thing that God has tied everyone's salvation. That is the way God has arranged things. Little by little he gives to those who pray with perseverance so much light and so much strength, that even the most debased sinner will can pick himself up even if he were sunk in the slime up to his neck!

During the last years of my life I no longer prayed as I should have, so I deprived myself of those graces without which nobody can be saved.

Where we are now, we no longer receive any grace, and even if it were offered we should scorn it. All the fluctuations of earthly existence stop when you get here. You on earth can pass from a state of sin to a state of grace and then fall back into sin again, often through weakness, sometimes through malice.

But once you die all that comes to an end because it is only the instability of earthly life that makes it possible. From the moment of death our state is final and unchangeable.

Already on earth, with the passing of the years, these changes in the state of one's soul become rarer and rarer. It is true that up to the moment of death one can always return to God or turn away from Him.

But it does happen that the habits a man has followed during his lifetime all too often affect his behaviour at the point of death. Habit becomes second nature to him and he goes to his grave still following it.

That is what happened to me. For years I was living far away from God, and because of that, when I heard the final call of grace, I turned away from Him.

What was fatal for me was not that I sinned a lot, but that when I had sinned I had not the will to pick myself up again.

Several times you told me to go and listen to sermons or to read spiritual books, and I usually said that I hadn't the time. And yet what you said increased the uncertainty I felt inside like nothing else.

I must admit that by the time I left the young people's association I had already learned so much that I could very well have changed my ways. I was ill at ease and unhappy with my way of life. But always something stood between me and conversion.

I never suspected what was going on. You thought it would be so easy for me to come back to God. One day you told me, "Just make a good confession, Anne, and then everything will be alright." I felt you were right, but the world, the flesh and the devil already had too firm a hold on me.

At that time I had never believed that the devil was at work. But now I assure you that he has an enormous influence on people who are in the state I was in then.

Only many prayers, from myself and from others, together with sacrifices and sufferings, would have been able to tear me from his clutches, and even then it would have been a slow process.

If there are only few externally possessed, there are very many inwardly. The devil cannot steal the free will from those who give themselves under his influence. But in punishment of their, so to speak, methodical desertion, God allows the devil to settle in them.

I even hate the devil, and yet at the same time I am pleased about him, because he tries to destroy all of you people. Yes I hate him, him and his satellites, those formerly angelic spirits that fell with him at the beginning of time. There are millions of them prowling about the earth alike swarms of flies, and you do not even notice them. It is not reserved to us, the damned souls, to tempt you. That job is only for the fallen angels.

In truth every time they drag down here to hell a human soul their own torture is increased. But what will hatred not do?

I was wandering far from God, yet He followed me. I opened the way for grace by natural acts of charity which I performed quite often, simply because I was naturally inclined to do so.

There were times when God drew me towards a church, and then I felt a kind of homesickness. When my mother was ill and I was looking after her at the same time as doing my job at the office I was really making a kind of self-sacrifice. Those were the times when God's calls were especially strong.

Once, when you took me into a hospital chapel during the lunch break, something happened which led me to the brink of conversion. I wept!

But immediately the pleasures of the world flooded back into my mind and overshadowed God's grace. The good seed was choked by the thorns.

They often said at the office that religion was just a matter of emotion, so I took that excuse to reject that particular call of grace as I had all the others.

You told me off one day because instead of making a proper genuflection in church I just did a half-hearted sort of bob. You thought I was just being lazy. You did not even seem to suspect that I had already stopped believing in God's presence in the Sacrament. I believe in it now, but only in a natural way, as you believe in a storm when you see the damage it leaves behind.

Already I was just making up my own religion to suit myself. I agreed with the others at the office that when you died your soul went into someone else so that it went on a kind of everlasting pilgrimage. That solved the agonizing question of the Beyond and you did not have to worry about it anymore.

Why did you not remind me of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, where Christ sends the one to Paradise straight after his death, and the other to Hell. Oh sure, you wouldn't have got anywhere with it, any more with any of your other pious old maids' stories.

Bit by bit I made up my own god--a god properly dressed up to be called "God" but sufficiently remote for me not to have any dealings with him. He was a vague sort of god, to be made use of when I needed him. A kind of pantheistic god if you like, the sort of abstract god who might come in useful for poetry but who wouldn't have anything to do with my real world. This god had no Heaven to reward me with and no Hell to punish me. My way of worshipping him was to leave him alone. It is easy to believe what suits you. For years I got on very well with my religion and so I was happy.

Only one thing could have shattered my stubbornness--one lasting and deep sorrow, but that sorrow never came. Now do you understand the meaning of the saying, "God chastises those he loves"?

One Sunday in July the young people's group arranged an outing somewhere. I would have quite liked to go but those old-hat talks, those old maids' ways of carrying on all put me off.

Besides, for some time I had been keeping a very different picture from that of the Madonna on the altar of my heart!

It was that good-looking Max in the shop next door. We had already cracked a joke together a few times. Well, as it happens, that very Sunday he had invited me to go out with him.

The girl he had been going out with was ill in the hospital. He had realised I had my eyes on him, though I hadn't then thought of marrying him. He was obviously well off, but he was too nice to all the girls, and up till then I had only wanted a man who did not think of anyone but me. I did not just want to be his wife, I wanted to be the only woman in his life.

I was always attracted by well-mannered men, and when we were out together Max went out of his way to be nice. Though you can imagine we did not talk about the pious stuff you and your friends go in for.

The next day at the office you were telling me off because I had not gone with the rest of you on the outing, and I told you what I had been doing that Sunday. The first thing you asked was, "Did you go to Mass?" You idiot! How could I have gone to Mass, seeing we had arranged to leave at six in the morning?

And no doubt you remember how I lost my patience and said, "God doesn't make such a fuss about these little things like you and your priests do!"

But now I have to admit that despite His infinite goodness, God weighs things up much more exactly than all your priests put together.

After that first outing with Max I only went back to the young people's association once more. That was for the Christmas celebrations. There was still something that attracted me to ceremonies of that kind, but at heart I was not one of you anymore.

Movies, dances, outings--it was one thing after another all the time. Max and I sometimes had rows, but I could always get him to make up.

I had a lot of trouble with his other girlfriend, who went after him like a mad thing as soon as she got out of hospital. That was a bit of luck for me because my noble calm which was quite the opposite of her behaviour made a big impression on Max and he ended up opting for me.

I had learned how to use words to turn him against her. On the surface I would seem to be saying nice things but inwardly I would be spitting venom. Feelings like that and that kind of behvaiour are an excellent preparation for hell. They are diabolical in the strictest sense of the word.

Why am I telling you this? It is to explain how I cut myself off once and for all from God.

Oh, it was not that at that stage Max and I had become very intimate in our relationship. I knew I would have gone down in his estimation if I had let myself go all the way too soon, and that knowledge held me back, but deep down I was ready to do anything if I thought it would further my aims, because I was out to get Max at any cost. I would have given absolutely anything to have him.

In the meantime we were slowly learning to love one another. We both had valuable personal qualities, which we were learning to appreciate in each other. I was clever, capable, good company, and at least in the last months before we married I was his only girlfriend.

My desertion of God consisted in this: that I made an idol of a human creature. That kind of thing can only happen when you love someone of the opposite sex with a love which remains bound by earthly considerations. It is this kind of unbalanced love that transfixes you, obsesses you and finally poisons you. My worship of Max was really becoming a kind of religion for me.

That was the time when, at the office, I started saying everything bad I could think of about churches and priests and Rosary-jabbering and all that kind of tomfoolery. You tried to defend it all, more or less subtly. You obviously did not realise that deep down I was not so bothered with insulting those things as with finding something to bolster up my conscience and find some justification for my desertion of God.

Deep down I had been rebelling against God. You did not understand it. You thought I was still a Catholic. I wanted people to think I was. I even used to pay my ecclesiastical dues. I told myself that a bit of insurance couldn't do me any harm.

Maybe your reactions were right sometimes. On me they made no lasting impression, since I made up my mind you must not be right. Because of this strained relationship between the two of us, neither of us was sorry to say Good-bye on the occasion of my marriage.

Before the wedding I went to Confession and Communion once more. It was a precept. My husband and I thought alike on this point. Why should we be made to comply with these formalities? We complied with this, like everyone else, as with the other formalities.

You people would call a Communion like that unworthy. Well, after that unworthy Communion, my conscience was a lot clearer. In any case, I never went to Communion again.

By and large our married life was spent in great harmony. We agreed about everything, including the fact that we did not want the burden of children. At a stretch my husband would have liked to have one, no more, of course. In the end I succeeded in dissuading him even from this desire.

I was far more concerned with dresses, luxurious furniture, going out, meeting friends, places of entertainment, picnics and trips by car, and other pleasures.

It was a year of pleasure on earth, the one that passed from my marriage to my sudden death. Every Sunday we went out in the car, or else we went to visit my husband's parents, who lived just as superficially as we did.

At heart, of course, I was not happy, even though I put on a smiling face for the world. There was always something indeterminate gnawing away inside me. I should have liked to believe that death, which I naturally thought was many years away, would be the end of everything.

Once when I was a child I heard a priest say in a sermon that God rewards us for every good work we perform and that when He cannot reward us in the life to come, he does it on Earth. That is very true.

Unexpectedly I had an inheritance from my Aunt Lotte. At the same time my husband started earning a very good salary. So I was able to furnish our new home in an attractive way.

By this time religion did not show its light but from afar off, pale, dim and flickering. The cafes in the towns and the inns we stayed at on our travels certainly did not point us towards God. All the people who went to those places lived like us, getting their pleasures from external things first and foremost instead of living a primarily interior life.

If we did sometimes visit churches when we were travelling around on holidays we only did so for their artistic interest. There was a religious atmosphere emanating from those buildings, especially the medieval ones, but I could neutralize it by making some criticism which seemed to the point at the time.

For instance I would have a go at some lay-brother for making a bit of a mess of showing us around, or for being sloppily dressed. Or I would think how scandalous it was that monks who pretend to be so holy should sell liqueurs, or perhaps I would think about the endless bell-ringing calling the people to services when it was only a matter of making money. That is how I turned God's grace away each time it knocked at the door of my soul.

I used to give free vent to my ill humor, especially at certain medieval representations of Hell in cemeteries or elsewhere, showing the devil roasting souls over glowing red coals, while his companions dragged new victims down with their long tails. Oh Claire! People can be mistaken in the way they depict Hell, but they can never exaggerate!

I always had my own ideas about the fires of hell. You remember we were discussing the question once and I struck a match under your nose and said sarcastically, "Does it smell like that?" You put the flame out quickly. Well, nobody puts it out here!

I assure you that the fire the Bible talks about is not just the torment of conscience. Fire is fire! What He said, "Away from Me, you accursed, into eternal fire," is to be understood literally. Literally!

You will say to me, how can spirits be affected by material fire? Doesn't your soul suffer on earth when you put your finger in the fire? The soul doesn't actually burn, but what agony your whole being goes through!

Likewise we here in this place are spiritually bound to the fire in our nature and our faculties. The soul is deprived of its natural freedom of action. We cannot think what we should like, nor as we should like. Do not be shocked at what I am telling you. This state means nothing to you, but I am being burned here--without being consumed.

Our greatest torture consists in the certain knowledge that we shall never see God. How can this torture us so much when we were so indifferent about it on earth? As long as the knife lies on the table, it leaves you cold. You see how sharp it is, but you are not afraid of it. Plunge the knife into the flesh and you will be writhing in pain. It is now that we actually feel the loss of God, whereas before we only thought about it.

Not all souls suffer to the same degree. The more maliciously and systematically a man has sinned, so much the more heavily will the loss of God weigh down upon him.

Catholics who are damned suffer more than members of other religions, because usually they have been offered and have refused more graces and more enlightenment. The one who had more knowledge in his lifetime suffers more severely than the one who knew less. If one has sinned out of malice, one suffers more intensely than if it had been out of weakness. But nobody suffers more than he has deserved. Oh, if only that were not true! Then I should reason to hate.

You said to me one day that it had been revealed to some saint that nobody goes to Hell without knowing. I laughed but afterwards I reassured myself by saying secretly, "In that case, if the need arises, I can always do an about-turn." That is true. Before my sudden end I did not know Hell for what it is. No human being knows it. But I was fully aware that it existed. I said to myself, "If you die you will go into the life beyond straight as an arrow aimed at God, and you will have to suffer the consequence."

But as I have already told you, despite such a thought, I did not change my ways. Force of habit pushed me on and I let it take control of me. For the older one gets, the stronger the power of habit becomes.

My death happened this way. One week ago--I am speaking according to your reckoning of time, for from the point of view of the pain I have been suffering, I could well say I have been burning in Hell already ten years--however a week ago, my husband and I on a Sunday went on a picnic. It was the last one for me.

The day was glorious. I was feeling on top of the world. An almost sinister foreboding sense of pleasure invaded me all the day long.

On the way back, my husband was dazzled by the lights of a car coming in the other direction and lost control of our car.

Automatically I uttered the name "Jesus!" Not as a prayer but as a shout. I felt a searing pain in every fibre of my being, though in comparison with what I am feeling now only a trifle. Then I lost consciousness.

How strange it was on that very morning that a persistent thought had been nagging me for no apparent reason: "You could go to Mass once more." It seemed like someone were begging me. It seemed like the last call of Love. Clear and resolute, my "No!" stifled it. I said to myself, "You have got to have done with that nonsense once and for all." Now I have to suffer the consequence of my resolution.

You will already know what happened after my death, what became of my husband and my mother, what happened to my corpse, and the details of my funeral. These are known to me through some natural knowledge we are allowed here. In fact we know what happens on earth but only in a dim and confused way but we know what touches us closely. I see the place where you are staying now.

At the moment of my death I found myself in a misty world, but then suddenly I awoke from the darkness, in the instant of my passing, and saw myself flooded by an overwhelming blinding light.

I was still at the place where my dead body was lying. It was like being in a theatre. All of a sudden, the lights go out, the curtain goes up with a terrific noise, and you find yourself faced with an unexpected scene, horrible illuminated.

What I was seeing was the scene of my whole life. My soul was shown to me as in a mirror, with all the graces I had rejected from my youth up until my final "No!" to God's call.

I felt myself like a murderer on trial in court and confronted with the dead body of his victim. Would I repent? Never! Was I ashamed? No, not that either!

However I could no longer bear to stand before the eyes of the God I had finally rejected. There was only one thing left for me. To flee from His presence!

As Cain fled from the dead body of Abel, so my soul rushed from that vision of horror. And that was the Particular Judgment. The invisible Judge pronounced sentence: "Away from Me!"

Then my soul, clothed in sulphur, hurled itself like a shadow headlong into the place of everlasting torment.

Don't Despair Say This Prayer

Put on a Miraculous Medal and say this prayer every day. Remember O most gracious Virgin Mary that never was it known in any age that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto you, O Virgin of Virgins, my Mother, to you do I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions but in your clemency, hear and answer me. Amen.